Lebensphilosophie

conservative revolution and the cult of life

pp. 155-181

in: Nitzan Lebovic, The philosophy of life and death, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Not surprisingly, World War I left scars on a whole generation of army veterans in Germany, a generation that was as philosophically inclined as it was conservative. Many of them found in Ludwig Klages a voice to express their postwar sentiments and attitudes; in fact, a series of conservative texts citing Klages's influence quickly shaped the revolutionary tendencies of young intellectuals usually identified with the conservative revolution in the final years of the Weimar republic.¹ By 1930 a number of them were leading much of the reaction against the Weimar republic and Western democracy: Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was already a famous man, after the publication of his two-part work Decline of the West (1918 and 1922). Carl Schmitt published a series of highly sophisticated reactionary works calling for the empowering of law and sovereignty, grounded in Catholic and Germanic values, as demonstrated in his Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), and an essay called "The Concept of the Political" (1927, full book in 1932).² Hans Freyer published a well-received piece of conservative agitation known as The State (1926), and Ernst Jünger, who became a celebrity after the publication of his autobiographical novels, Storm of Steel (1920) and The Battle as a Living Experience (1925), gave violence an eidetic and ecstatic appearance in Total Mobilization (1931), where the concept of Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication) makes frequent appearances at his deadly battlefields.